Tag: susan collins

ObamaCare turns eight years old today. Some opponents had hoped to mark the occasion by giving supporters the birthday gift they’ve always wanted: a GOP-sponsored bailout of ObamaCare-participating private insurance companies. Fortunately, a dispute over subsidies for abortion providers killed what could have been the first of many GOP ObamaCare bailouts.

ObamaCare premiums have been skyrocketing. All indications are this will continue in 2019, with insurers announcing premium increases up to 32 percent or more just before this year’s mid-term elections. Some Republicans fear voters will punish them for the effects of a law every Republican opposed and most still want to repeal.

Senate health committee chairman Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), and House Energy & Commerce Committee chairman Greg Walden (R-OR) hope to avert calamity by expanding on a proven failure. For months, they have been pushing legislation that would resurrect ObamaCare’s expired “reinsurance” program with $30 billion of new funding.

ObamaCare’s architects knew the law’s preexisting-conditions provisions would effectively destroy the individual health insurance market. They added the reinsurance program in an attempt to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

ObamaCare’s preexisting-conditions provisions both increase health-insurance premiums and reduce health-insurance quality. They achieve the former, first, by requiring insurers to cover patients with uninsurable preexisting conditions, and again by unleashing adverse selection. Those factors in turn reduce quality by literally punishing insurers who offer high-quality coverage for the sick.

From 2014 until it expired at the end of 2016, ObamaCare’s reinsurance program gave participating insurers extra taxpayer subsidies to cover the claims of high-cost patients whom its preexisting-conditions provisions require them to cover at a loss. The extra subsidies were supposed to reduce premiums, and prevent a race to the bottom fueled by ObamaCare’s penalties on quality coverage.

If ObamaCare’s reinsurance program was supposed to keep premiums from skyrocketing, it was an utter failure. Premiums increased 18-25 percent per year from 2013 through 2016, well above the trend of 3-4 percent from 2008 to 2013. By 2017, premiums had doubled—a cumulative increase of 99 percent or 105 percent, depending on the source—from pre-ObamaCare levels. ObamaCare’s preexisting-conditions provisions were the driving force behind these premium increases.

In response to civil unrest, the Egyptian government appears to have ordered service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet. According to the blog post at the link just above, Egypt’s four main ISPs have cut off their connections to the outside world. Specifically, their “BGP routes were withdrawn.” The Border Gateway Protocol is what most Internet service providers use to establish routing between one another, so that Internet traffic flows among them.

An attack on BGP is one of few potential sources of global shock cited by an OECD report I noted here the other day. The report almost certainly imagined a technical attack by rogue actors but, assuming current reporting to be true, the source of this attack is a government exercising coercion over Internet service providers within its jursidiction. Nothing I pick up suggests that Egypt’s attack on its own Internet will have spillover effects, but it does suggest some important policy concerns.

The U.S. government has proposed both directly and indirectly to centralize control over U.S. Internet service providers. C|Net’s Declan McCullagh reports that an “Internet kill switch” proposal championed by by Sens. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) will be reintroduced in the new Congress very soon. The idea is to give “kill switch” authority to the government for use in responding to some kind of “cyberemergency.”

We see here that a government with “kill switch” power will use it when the “emergency” is a challenge to its authority. When done in good faith, flipping an Internet “kill switch” would be stupid and self-destructive, tantamount to an auto-immune reaction that compounds the damage from a cybersecurity incident. The more likely use of “kill switch” authority would be bad faith, as the Egyptian government illustrates, to suppress speech and assembly rights.

In the person of the Federal Communications Commission, the U.S. government has also proposed to bring Internet service providers under a regulatory umbrella that it could then use for censorship or protest suppression in the future. On the TechLiberationFront blog, Larry Downes has recently completed a five-part analysis of the government’s regulatory plan (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). The intention of its proponents is in no way to give the government this kind of authority, but government power is not always used as intended, and there is plenty of scholarship to show that government agencies use their power to achieve goals that are non-statutory and even unconstitutional.

The D.C. area’s surfeit of recent weather caused the cancellation yesterday of a book event I was to participate in, discussing Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. I don’t know that he makes the case overwhelmingly, but Morozov argues that governments are ably using the Internet to stifle freedom movements.

Events going on here in the United States right now could position the U.S. government to exercise the kind of authority we might look down our noses at Egypt for practicing. The lesson from the Egypt story—what we know of it so far—is that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.

The union- and trial-lawyer-backed Paycheck Fairness Act, which would greatly expand the scope of lawsuits against private employers alleging gender pay inequality, has run into considerable resistance in Congress. The Bangor Daily News, for example, notes that middle-of-the-road Maine Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, known for their willingness to support some Democratic initiatives, have criticized the PFA as “broad,” “unprecedented,” and costly to employers (Snowe) and as likely to “impose excessive litigation on the small-business community” (Collins).

“If there is litigation in the future, that is minor compared to making sure that people get fair pay for the work that they do,” Pingree said. “It is also important to say that this only applies to big business, this does not apply to the sandwich shop around the corner.”

What do you think she means by “only applies to big business” and not “the sandwich shop around the corner”? Keith Smith at ShopFloor checked out the language of the bill, which by its own terms would affect employers subject to the federal Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Does the FLSA apply “only … to big business”? No; according to the U.S. Department of Labor, it covers “almost every employee working in the United States.” To begin with, the law covers all employers that have two or more employees and do at least $500,000 a year in business. But that’s just the start, as Smith explains:

Even if a business meets these thresholds, the only employees who would not be covered by the FLSA would be the ones who do not produce goods for interstate commerce, or closely-related process or occupation directly essential to such production, who are not involved in domestic service and are not engaged in interstate commerce. So that means if an employee makes a phone call to another state, sends mail to another state, travels to other states or even processes credit card transaction [he or she] is engaged in “interstate commerce”.

It sounds as if Rep. Pingree has a distinctive, not to say eccentric, understanding of what constitutes “only … big business”.